Such a device, Hall says, would be similar in principle to a workgroup printer. When printers first came out, it was common practice to directly connect printers to desktops. As time went on, printers became more powerful and network connected, so they could be shared among many users. “Desktops need to be treated the same way,” Hall says.

Whoever builds the workgroup computer will need to pay attention to performance. Hall says two requirements are (a) that it doesn’t sacrifice video streaming or 3D modeling capabilities and (b) that it isn’t limited by data center power constraints.

Hall notes that there’s much untapped potential in desktop computers: if you take the top ten U.S. banks by consolidated assets, and you assume one processor core per employee, that adds up to 1.5 million processors. The top ten supercomputers break down to a mere 460,000 processors. “Typically there’s more than one core on users’ desktops, which tells us there’s enough computing power at the desktop getting powered up all the time and underutilized, that if we got more creative in managing and deploying it where it is today, we’d have a supercomputer,” Hall says. “In addition to compute efficiency, the workgroup computer design also provides faster provisioning and higher availability while reducing energy consumption. Unlike today’s desktop designs, workgroup computers will be designed to save cash, time, energy and the environment automatically.”

It will be interesting to see which vendors jump on this opportunity and how they do it.